Index

Thermalright currently has a mounting mechanism that works only with Intel sockets 775/1156/1366, which leaves AMD out of the picture. The company did, however, announce it’s working on an AMD socket mounting mechanism.

HR-02 doesn’t come with a provided fan but Thermalright included two brackets – one for a 12cm and one for a 14cm fan, so you can mount two fans. We ended up using the 12cm fan bracket when we were mounting a second 14cm fan, but naturally this is not advisable as the fan won’t be held properly.

You’ll also find a long screwdriver, installation manual, Chill Factor3 thermal paste and anti-vibration elements with sticky tape for one fan.

Setting the HR-02 up is pretty simple, and the mounting procedure is pretty much the same for all supported Intel sockets as the backplate and the rest of the parts are universal.

The motherboard on the picture is Elitegroup’s X58B-A. Mounting the HR-02 on it was a breeze and as Thermalright says, HR-02 is compatible with most motherboards.

The following picture clearly shows that the cooler’s heatsink is nudged forwards, in order to boost efficiency by utilizing the rear panel fan.

Thermalright HR-02’s motherboards compatibility list includes many motherboards currently on the market, and you can check out the list here. We’d however advise you to take the list with a grain of salt as we managed to mount the HR-02 on an EVGA X58 FTW3 with ease, despite the fact that the motherboard was listed as incompatible.

EVGA Classified 4-Way SLI motherboard is listed as compatible but we’d rather put it as partially-compatible. The reason for this is that the chipset’s large heatsink will make you turn the HR-02 towards the top panel fan.

EVGA Classified 4-Way SLI, on the other hand, is listed as compatible. Unfortunately, in our book it should be listed as semi-compatible or something of the sort as its large chipset heatsink got in the way of HR-02, so we had to turn the latter towards the top panel fan. Naturally, in this case you’ll have to rely on the top-panel one, if you have one of course. That didn’t bother our HR-02 too much placed inside HAF X case as it was still pretty efficient.

We’ve shown you initial results scored by the HR-02, but our testbed used an older system based on EVGA’s 780i SLI motherboard (socket 775), which also isn’t fully compatible with the HR-02. We easily fixed the problem by mounting a small passive heatsink with two smaller heatsink (pictures below).